The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

Ghulam Hussain Khan, by far the sharpest observer of his time, was quick to realise what this would mean on the ground. Firstly, it signified the effective extinction of his entire social class. The Mughal nobility, whose power had ultimately rested on their expertise as cavalrymen, were now effectively unemployed as the Company replaced them with infantrymen they recruited largely from rural Hindu Rajput and Brahmin backgrounds. Long before anyone else had thought through the full effects of this new corporate colonialism and its infantry warfare, Ghulam Hussain Khan was lamenting the fate of ‘the remaining stock of the ancient nobility … who in these hard times have not one single resource left under the canopy of the Hindostany heaven … Numbers therefore have already quitted their homes and countries, and numbers unwilling to leave their abodes, have made a covenant with hunger and distress, and ended their lives in poverty in the corner of their cottages.’ He estimated that these changes would throw between 40,000 and 50,000 troopers out of employment across Bengal and Bihar, besides dispersing ‘the thousands and thousands of merchants’ who followed ‘that numerous cavalry’. This is turn had an important economic and civilisational effect: ‘The even more numerous artisans whom the noblemen had always kept busy, sometimes in their own houses’ found their patrons no longer capable of sustaining them or their in-house kar-khanas. Alternative employment was hard to find, fo...